Some of my Ottawa elves tell me that government officials – including the PMO – are starting to get frustrated by the lack of good data in higher education.  I’m not surprised.  Consider:

• We’re in one of those lull periods, between rounds of the National Graduate Survey (NGS).  The last one came out in late-2008 and looked at the experiences of 2005 grads in 2007, and the next one isn’t due out for another year or so.  Those who have been studying this stuff for 20+ years know that NGS data is remarkably stable, even in recessions, and so they don’t mind much.  However, for your average policymaker, or student leader, the 2005 class data is impossibly out-of-date, and is not to be trusted.

• The Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) data’s getting old.  Sure, we’ve got one more round set to be released (in March, I believe), but the younger cohort is now aged 25 and, for the most part, out of school.  It’s still a brilliant tool for looking at school-to-work pathways, but for looking at secondary-to-postsecondary transitions it’s now almost ten years old.

• Ditto the National Apprenticeship Survey (NAS), also a decade old.  We still get a little bit of data on apprentices from the Registered Apprenticeship Information System (RAIS), but RAIS data doesn’t give you much beyond raw numbers.

• The Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which is meant to be the backbone of the whole post-secondary system, delivering clear information after almost fifteen years in operation, only vaguely works the way it was intended.

• The Access and Support to Education and Training Survey (ASETS), a multi-purpose survey which, among other things, contains a survey of 5000 current students is still around (and last conducted in 2008), but it’s of limited usefulness. It’s too focused on student aid, not enough on quality, and since it was disconnected from the Labour Force Survey, it no longer has a reliable family income indicator, which means it’s not very useful from an access point-of-view.

Now, whenever someone in the Government of Canada – particularly on the political side – remarks about inadequate education data, one might be naturally tempted to respond with, “THIS IS A JOKE, RIGHT?  AFTER ALL THE STATSCAN CUTS, NOW YOU WHINE ABOUT DATA?”  But patience, grasshoppers.  The government is starting to shake off its paranoid minority government habits, and is acting as though it’s here for the long term.  As such, it’s going to need a decent information base for decision-making.  We will need a new suite of surveys and studies, which can answer most of the big questions more frequently and more cheaply than the old one.  And the time to start thinking about this is now.